What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [57]
Thomas is still a bit incredulous that his work as a dancer receives notice at all. “If I watch myself on video, all I see is the gawky way I move and I see my skinny legs, and I just can’t see what others see,” he told me one night over drinks in a bar following a ten-hour day of rehearsals at the Dance Exchange studio in Takoma Park, Maryland.
“You know, if I lay on the floor on my back, I can’t even put my hands on the floor. I’ve been missing that flexibility since childhood. But there’s something in what I do as a dancer—Liz Lerman says it’s the honesty in my movement—that satisfies her. She believes in me and she knows how to choreograph every move I make. And if it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me,” he said. “Still, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
His family could not quite believe it either. Doris, his wife of fifty years, and his three grown children were initially mystified, if not perplexed. When his children were young, he had a controlled, conservative demeanor, and never showed the slightest bit of athletic ability or artistic inclination. But there was something even more antithetical to his later life pursuit of dance. Thomas had only one quality of movement—rigid.
“When my father first announced that he was going to perform modern dance, it was a strange and almost unfathomable thing,” recalled daughter Susan Frimmel, a forty-seven-year-old administrator for a robotics company. “It was like someone saying, ‘I think I will take a Sunday drive to the moon.’ ”
It is no coincidence that Thomas relishes his ability to challenge assumptions—not just about his physical abilities as a dancer, but also about his most basic identity—often employing a sly sense of humor to do so. I learned as much the first time we spoke. As the phone call ended, Thomas wished me a Happy Hanukkah. I thanked him and said good-bye. But before I could hang up, he asked, “Aren’t you going to wish me a Happy Hanukkah, too?” I was a little baffled. I said I would be happy to wish him a happy holiday, but I assumed that he was Irish Catholic. “I’m Jewish,” he said, with a wink in his voice that made it difficult to tell if he was pulling my leg.
As it turned out, he was not putting me on in the least. Moreover, over time, it became clear that the story of Thomas’s mixed parentage is critical to appreciating the search for expression and identity that brought him to dance. His father, Harry Francis Dwyer, was a Yellow Cab meter mechanic and a New York-reared Irish American Catholic. His mother, born Sonia Tsarkofski, was an Orthodox Jew. She was a child in Lutz, Poland, when the Germans invaded during World War I, and her survival was miraculous and terrifying. Her mother tried hiding Sonia and her nine-year-old sister from the Germans in a cellar. While in hiding, Thomas’s grandmother died of natural causes, leaving her young daughters to await their fate. German soldiers eventually found the girls and beat them brutally, before they kidnapped Thomas’s aunt, who was never to be seen or heard from again, and let Thomas’s orphaned mother go. That is the story as Thomas knows it. “My mother never wanted to talk about her life in Poland. It was too painful,” Thomas said.
A photograph of his mother visiting her father’s grave in Poland and another of his aunt, his mother’s abducted sister, hang on the wall of Thomas’s study at his home in Taneytown, Maryland. The picture of his mother appeared as a photographic backdrop in one of Liz Lerman’s most compelling works, Shehekianu, a dance in which members of the company share fragments of their family histories. Thomas appears early and moves gravely. He